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How to repair xls files

robert79

Posted 30 June 2015 - 04:33 AM

robert79

New Member

Member

1 posts

I have a xls file which I can open in excel 2003 but when i try to open it in excel 2007. The message below appears "Excel found unreadable content in work.xls. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the source of this workbookm, click yes."

After I clicked yes...the content displayed is unreadable. Below is the log file.

Microsoft Office Excel File Repair Log

Errors were detected in file 'E:\work.xls'

The following is a list of repairs:

Damage to the file was so extensive that repairs were not possible. Excel attempted to recover your formulas and values, but some data may have been lost or corrupted.

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Dashing star

Posted 30 June 2015 - 05:49 AM

When Microsoft Excel detects a corrupted workbook upon opening, it automatically starts File Recovery mode and attempts to repair the workbook. If File Recovery mode doesn’t start, try using this manual process to recover your workbook:

Click File > Open.

Click the location and folder that contains the corrupted workbook.

In the Open dialog box, select the corrupted workbook.

Click the arrow next to the Open button, and then click Open and Repair.

To recover as much of the workbook data as possible, pick Repair.

If Repair isn’t able to recover your data, pick Extract Data to extract values and formulas from the workbook.

If neither automatic nor manual repair works, there are some recovery methods that might help salvage your data. You can also take some preventive measures to avoid losing your work by automatically saving a backup copy of your workbook or creating a recovery file from time to time.

Sometimes when Excel fails to open your file, these tools may be able to open it successfully. If that is the case, then after the Excel file is opened, you can just save it as a new file which will be error-free.

4. For xlsx files, they are actually a group of files compressed in Zip file format. Therefore, sometimes, if the corruption is only caused by the Zip file, then you can use Zip repair tools such as WinRAR at http://www.rarlab.comto repair the file, as follows:

4.1 Assuming the corrupt Excel file is a.xlsx, then you need to rename it to a.zip

There may still be some warnings when opening the fixed file in Excel, just let ignore it and Excel will try to open and repair the fixed file. If the file can be opened successfully, then you can just save the contents into another error-free file.

5. If all above methods do not work, then you may try third-party tools such as DataNumen Excel Repair at